Fabrizio Macagno

The detection and analysis of misunderstandings are crucial aspects of discourse analysis, which presuppose a twofold investigation of their structure. On the one hand, misunderstandings need to be identified and more importantly justified, and for this reason a classification of the types and force of evidence of a misunderstanding is needed. On the other hand, misunderstandings reveal differences in the interlocutors’ interpretations of an utterance, which can be examined by considering 1) the interpretative process(es) they rely on, and 2) the presumptions that they use in their interpretation, which they take to be shared by the interlocutor. The purpose of this presentation is to advance a classification of the types and the probative weights of the evidence that can be used to detect misunderstandings at different levels of interpretation.

Fabrizio Macagno, ArgLab, IFILNOVA, Universidade Nova de Lisboa